Obama: 'The buck stops with me'

Taking a decidedly different tack from his predecessor in the face of a government failure, President Barack Obama on Thursday took the blame for shortcomings that led to a failed Christmas Day bombing plot, saying, “The buck stops with me.”

Aides to Obama signaled that he was consciously seeking to be the anti-Bush, airing the administration’s dirty laundry and stepping up to take his share of the responsibility.

Story Continued Below

“The president also wanted to do something, I think, unusual today,” National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said during a webchat after Obama’s speech. “Not only was this a very quick accounting, not only did the president accept responsibility for it, but the president also wanted to do this as transparently as possible.”

Quick, transparent, willing to take the blame — all things Obama has said President George W. Bush was not.

It was a distillation of everything Obama has criticized Bush for over the years — whether about intelligence in the war in Iraq, about diverting resources away from Afghanistan, about opening a terror prison in Cuba.

But for all the ways he ran as the anti-Bush and has sought to govern as one as well, there is one legacy of Bush that is hard for Obama to shake — talking tough.

Obama took direct aim at some of the harshest GOP criticism directed his way in the wake of the Christmas plot — most of which was summed up by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said, in effect, that Obama just doesn’t get it, just doesn’t understand that the nation is locked in mortal combat with Islamic fundamentalists.

Obama’s reply came in four very Bushian words: “We are at war.”

“We are at war against Al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on Sept. 11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them,” Obama said.

While officials suggested Obama was taking ownership of the problem, his buck-stops-here message was something of a shift from earlier statements in which Obama and other officials repeatedly noted that the watch list system that failed to flag the suspect, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, was put in place under the Bush administration.

Three days after the attempted attack, in his first public comments on the issue, the president said he had ordered an immediate review of what he called “our watch list system, which our government has had in place for many years.”

“It's becoming clear that the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date,” Obama said the next day.

In Thursday’s statement, Obama included no such language about problems inherited from the Bush administration.

A onetime aide to former President Bush also recoiled at the White House's effort to suggest it was doing something the 43rd president would not do in taking responsibility for government errors.

Former White House press secretary Dana Perino cited several examples — including over failed intelligence in Iraq and over a sluggish early response to Hurricane Katrina — in which Bush used language very similar to Obama's on Thursday that the responsibility was his.

In his latest remarks, Obama said an intelligence review found that the U.S. government had the information needed to thwart the plot but failed to do so because of a series of compounding shortcomings, including that intelligence analysts didn’t focus heavily enough on information warning that Al Qaeda in Yemen wanted to strike the United States.

“The U.S. government had the information scattered through the system to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack. Rather than a failure to collect and share this intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence we already had,” Obama said in his 13-minute speech in the State Dining Room.